Some existing network traffic management devices include a network interface comprising of a software-based control segment (CS) and a hardware-based data flow segment (DFS), whereby the network interface performs network address translation or transformations to facilitate packet transmission to clients and servers. Performing the transformations in the hardware DFS component is much faster than in the software CS component. Whenever a new flow is handled by the network traffic management device, the CS enters a new flow entry and translation information into a flow table accessible by the network interface.
More than one network traffic management device may be incorporated into a virtualized clustered system, in which the network traffic management devices in the cluster can operate as virtual network devices which share the same flow table. Each network traffic management device in the cluster is referred to as a ‘guest’. For each guest, the network interface enters a flow entry, in which each flow entry may include source and destination L2 MAC and virtual MAC addresses, source IP, destination IP, source TCP port, destination TCP port, sequence number(s), VLAN, and/or a timestamp, for example. Accordingly, the amount of data that needs to be entered into the flow table is often more than 64 bytes, which is the per flow storage size of the flow table.